Institutional laundry facilities, such as those employed in many large hotels, nursing homes, and hospitals, typically employ washing machines with separate automated detergent dispensers. Generally, these institutional washing machines are larger and wash greater volumes of laundry over time than standard consumer washing machines used in homes. Typically, a separate, automated cleaning product dispenser is connected to one or two industrial washing machines to automatically deliver cleaning products, such as detergent, bleach, rinse agent, etc., according to logic designed or programmed into the dispenser.
In a broader sense, automated chemical product (“chemistry”) dispensers are useful in many different chemical application systems, including cleaning systems relating to laundry operations, warewashing operations (e.g., a dishwasher), water treatment operations, and pool and spa maintenance, as well as other systems, such as food and beverage operations and agricultural operations. For example, chemical products used in a warewashing operation may include detergent, de-ionized water, sanitizers, stain removers, etc. Chemistry used in agriculture may include without limitation pesticides, herbicides, hydration agents, and fertilizers. Other applications of the present invention may be used in, without limitation, dairies and dairy farms, (e.g., in teat dips); breweries; packing plants; pools spas, and other recreational water facilities; water treatment facilities; and cruise line. Other chemical products may include without limitation glass cleaning chemicals, hard surface cleaners, antimicrobials, germicides, lubricants, water treatment chemicals, rust inhibitors, etc.
Automated chemical product dispensers can reduce labor and chemistry costs by automatically delivering predetermined amounts of chemicals in a proper sequence. Furthermore, some chemical products can be hazardous in concentrated form; therefore, automated chemical product dispensers reduce the risks of exposure to operators, who would otherwise measure and deliver the chemical products manually.
In a laundry operation, to coordinate the proper delivery of cleaning product for each washing machine cycle, both the washing machine and the dispenser are preferably programmed to run a given “formula” for a particular type of item being washed. For example, if the laundry operator is washing bed sheets, he or she selects a washing machine selection corresponding to a set of cycles (i.e., a formula) for “sheets” and selects a separate dispenser setting corresponding to a “sheets” formula of chemical products (e.g., including possibly detergent, bleach, sanitizer, and rinse agent). Therefore, the dispenser supplies the proper cleaning product (or provides no cleaning product) for appropriate washer cycles, in accordance with the selected formulas. In this manner, for example, detergent is supplied to the washing machine during the wash cycle and not during the rinse cycle.
Unfortunately, operator error (i.e., improper formula selections on one or both of the washing machine and the dispenser) can result in the cleaning products being supplied to the washing machine during the wrong cycle or not at all. Such errors can result in improperly washed or potentially damaged laundry items. Other costly inefficiencies can include washing items without filling the wash basin to capacity, which wastes water, energy, and cleaning product and increases labor and maintenance costs.
In addition, individual institutional laundry accounts tend to be geographically dispersed, requiring many individual field service managers to physically visit individual laundry operations or accounts periodically, to monitor product usage on a periodic basis at those operations, and to provide the corrective instructions to the corresponding laundry operators. Typically, this manual method fails to provide the rapid feedback or the cross-account analysis that can be helpful to laundry operators in managing their operations.
Accordingly, it is desirable to maintain and analyze automatically a real-time or historical log of operational data detectable or storable by a dispenser or a dispenser-related device, preferably in relation to corporate information, such as work shifts, facility location, hotel occupancy rates, energy costs, etc., so as to facilitate rapid corrective action. Existing approaches, however, fail to provide the capability or capacity of automatically detecting large amounts of dispenser data, communicating and recording dispenser data and corporate data to a central database, and analyzing the data to provide feedback to the laundry operation and/or the dispenser, particularly across an aggregation of multiple accounts within the same corporation.